This small kitchen will pose significant questions on issues of cultural production and organizational practice as they relate to residency programs. How can modes of collaboration in residency programs adapt to the changing needs of artists, curators and institutions? How do broader political and economic realities impact artist residency programs today? How can organizations balance growth with sustainability?
– Variety of tenders in Switzerland?
– What are the opportunities, advantages and disadvantages?
– What is offered? What is paid / funded?
– Popularity of travel grants, where time can be self-determined

In contemporary art production, the medium specificity is disappearing in favor of open, often collaborative, platforms in which different art fields are integrated, as for instance music, design, visual arts and literature. If on one side these hybridity is creating interesting way of experimentation and breaking boundaries between disciplines, transversal cultural structures, such as interdisciplinary art spaces or museums, remain relatively rare. Moreover, the public foundations and other cultural supporter often are not designed to dialogue with transdisciplinary cultural practice.

Switzerland offers an incredibly dense and rich off scene, with independent art spaces proposing high quality programs on the whole national territory. In the last years, several projects have been developed with the aim of bringing together this various realities and defend common interests, some of which were quite successful. Nonetheless, the Swiss off scene still acts as a fragmented reality, mostly gravitating around some cultural poles, such as Bern, Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva and Basel. Many initiatives promoting encounters between offspaces have been developed in the last years, but they rarely cross the borders between linguistic regions. Collaborations are also diffuses, but generally they are limited to a specific network of friends.
Lot of projects are ephemeral, sometime existing for a very short time. Does it make sense and is it possible to create a reliable and consistent network of independent art projects?
Should offoff be reactivated? Should a new concept of national collaboration be developed?
Small informal collaborations are sometimes extremely effective and inspiring!

The art world of the 1960s was in the hands of art criticism and theory (Clement Greenberg), but that increasingly gained in the course of the following decades and the curators opinion became more influence. At the same time the roles have largely been softened or new conceptions has established itself: all can be anything. Artists can be collectors, gallery owner become to museum directors, artists are curators, collectors are curators, critics are also collectors, curator is now more an art manager.

Artist think they know, how they want to be treated and organize exhibitions, how they would like it.

Does the city need a new art space? What kind of new art space? Compared to the existing/active one? What could it bring to the city and its art scene? There is thing to do in Biel/Bienne, Bienne est “une ville qui bouge!”

The city is close to Neuchâtel, Solothurn, Bern, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Porrentruy… Is there the public for art? Pasquart gets the bourgeois! Lokal Int is a working structure and do not need concurence, leave the Lokal Int as it is! And Bienne is missing dinner like tonight! Maybe to do it more often?